With my recent university graduation came an onslaught of travel opportunities with my fellow grads: backpacking through Europe, camping across Canada, teaching English in Asia, safariing in Africa, saving the ecosystem in the North, driving to California ...

All of these were, naturally, excellent opportunities, but with two major flaws:

1) They interfered with my first engineering summer job, and2) They didn't include theme park visits.

Devastating, I know.

Happily, an end-of-summer travel opportunity arose with some of my old high school buds. Some time back, they decided to accept my pestering suggestions for an Orlando trip. Out of the nine of us, only four, including myself, have previously visited Orlando. To boot, of those four, only I have visited Disney World. The other three confined their previous Orlando vacations to Cocoa Beach and Universal Studios - a good start, but hardly an Orlando excursion.

When the opportunity arose to travel with these Disney virgins, I pounced on it. Why? Simply put, half the fun of a theme park vacation is experiencing it with those who have not been before.

See, as much as I love to watch TH and James whine about argue the merits of the Jungle Cruise, the truth is that a theme park is much more enjoyable if you can drop your criticisms. We Insiders, like critics of any medium, are fortunate to have constant exposure to the field we criticize. This is both advantageous and not. We sometimes forget the simple pleasures, like the feeling of arriving at your first true theme park, the surreal friendliness of the park's employees, or the look on a fat man's face when he buys his first turkey leg. I think Ratatouille's Anton Ego sums up my sentiments nicely:

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."

And that's why I'm so excited for this upcoming trip. Experiencing something like this with inexperienced travelers brings me back to my first visits. We Insiders might dismiss certain attractions as outdated and in need of replacing or repair, but to my friends these attractions will be new, fresh, and, more oft than not, awe-inspiring.

With less than two weeks until departure, I cannot help but feel elated.

I hear you Josh. My daughters are 2yrs old and 2 months old. I think I am actually going to attempt a trip next year(and mostly every year after that). I can not wait to see the parks through their eyes. HAVE FUN!!!

I totally agree with you, Josh. When I am at WDW, I am immersed in the experience, and spend very little time critiquing. Sure, I generally skip lesser attractions like the Jungle Cruise unless I have lots of spare time, but you never hear me complain about tired rides/shows, excessive crowds, missed opportunities, or overly commercialized theming. I leave those types of considerations at home, and think about them in retrospect as I file my trip reports, not while I am in the parks.

Besides, Disney is only ever "bad" when compared to itself. Compared to every other amusement park chain in the world, it is easily the best thing going.